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When it comes to software-defined networking, many people are guilty of missing the forest for the trees.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a buzz-term these days. Indeed,IDC predicts the worldwide SDN market will reach $8 billionby 2018. SDN is a prime example of the larger industrial trend to abstract away infrastructure functions from hardware. But make no mistake: SDN isn’t an end in itself; it’s part of a larger, transformative IT revolution that’s happening all around us.

SDN: Why all the hype?

As explained by SDN Central,software-defined networking is “a new approach to designing, building and managing networks. The basic concept is that SDN separates the network’s control (brains) and forwarding (muscle) planes to make it easier to optimize each."

So, what’s the big deal? SDN lets content take priority. If an organization has changing infrastructure demands or needs to quickly deploy new applications, SDN allows for rapid and reliable flexibility without costly hardware restructuring. As PacketLife.net describes, SDNallows the controller to make decisions factoring in the entire network, instead of just a local domain, providing better end-to-end visibility.

Sound pretty great? Sure. But SDN is just the tip of the iceberg. The really exciting thing that we should all be talking about is the bigger paradigm shift—the rest of that iceberg—happening in IT today.

Next-gen IT needs a platform to stand on

“It’s a very interesting time in this industry, there’s very a big transformation happening all across technology,” said Eric Barrett, director, CenturyLink Business Solutions Group.

SDN is a part of it, but Barrett sees SDN as just one example of a larger trend to decouple hardware functions from actual hardware, so there's greater flexibility, control and ease of use.

“Virtualization is at the heart of it," Barrett said. "You’re seeing the same dynamic that you saw when the iPhone first came out. There was a flood of applications and possibilities that changed the way people saw business functions. They wanted the same ease of use they [were getting] on their iPhones. Virtualization is giving them that ability.”

Even network functions are becoming virtualized, through what’s known as network functions virtualization (NFV).NFV takes functions like network address translation (NAT) and domain name services (DNS) that have resided on proprietary hardware and runs them in software,SDN Central explains.

Virtualized enterprise apps open up a plethora of new functions and capabilities. The challenge, according to Barrett, is that there’s no unified platform to make them manageable.

“At this point, there’s a lot of work from the customers’ perspective," he said. "They’re going to a cloud provider for virtual infrastructure. They’re going to a separate network provider for the network components of that infrastructure. They’re doing too much work themselves.”

Barrett noted that manually building a solution across multiple services providers is not only a lot of work, but it also presents some level of security risk. Individual departments end up with rogue IT solutions, solving application problems ad hoc through public cloud platforms and violating IT security protocols.

The solution for the industry, Barrett said, is to create easy, secure, private cloud virtualized infrastructure that’s robust and intuitive.

Many providers are beginning to do just that, and they’re trying to offer end-to-end solutions. Providers whose offerings were once specific to telecom, security, cloud infrastructure or disaster recovery, for example, are now taking on more and more responsibilities to create one-stop shops for IT.

For Barrett, that’s just the baseline. He is interested to see where standards for functions like NFV will converge, and acknowledged that there will be a lot of competition to gain platform dominance. But what he envisions at the end of all that is a highly customizable and dynamic enterprise applications marketplace infrastructure that will support the quick and easy addition of new network, cloud, hosting and managed services. Organizations could turn on software services like virtual firewall with the click of a button.

“The service provider industry can layer an application marketplace on top of the network and, at the same time, take that virtualized infrastructure at the data center level and integrate it at the lower [application] layer of the network,” Barrett said. “So at the front end, enterprises will experience an interactive marketplace and portal where they can buy, consume and manage their applications on a real-time basis. On the back end, enterprises will have virtual functions on premises so they can dynamically receive pushed software updates without scheduling costly and time-consuming truck rolls, for example.”

IT could become as easily manageable and intuitive as using an iPhone. The goal is attainable, Barrett believes, as long the industry realizes that growing a rich ecosystem is more than just about planting a single tree.